5 elements to live your best life

What would it mean to live your best life? Would you have enough money to travel and experience the world? Would you have financial security? Would you have plenty of friends and loved ones? Would you have a greater purpose? Good health and energy? Or, would you even know what it would take for you to be happier and more fulfilled?

The common misconception is that if you're wealthy, you have greater levels of happiness and a higher overall well-being. Research has found, however, that this is not the case. What does it take to live your best life? In his latest New York Times best seller, "Well-Being: The Five Essential Elements," Tom Rath provides a holistic view of the major areas that contribute to overall well-being. It's more than just wealth and it's more than just happiness; it's your level of satisfaction in everything you do!

Be sure and listen to Tom Rath's interview at www.richerlife.com where he shares his experience and research and shows how balance in the following five elements will contribute to positive well-being and life satisfaction.

1. Career Well-being: How can you maintain high career well-being if you're unengaged by your job?

2. Social Well-being: How much social time should you really be spending in a day?

3. Financial Well-being: Will an increase in your income truly amount to an increase in your financial well-being?

4. Physical Well-being: How can you stay motivated to exercise in the short-term to benefit from the long-term effects?

Robert: There's been a lot of research that shows we are pretty bad at predicting what's going to make us happy in the long term. Why do you think that is? We put a lot of emphasis on making money and our health, yet at the end of the day those two things aren't necessarily the ones that make a richer life.

Tom: What's interesting to me is that when we look at if there's any relative order of importance out of those five elements we don't say that one is necessarily more important than another. But when we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you're doing when you wake up each day. The second one is your social well-being, your relationships. Financial and physical are actually third and fourth, if you try and force them into this order of importance. And my stance personally, just more of an observation, is that our financial health, or wealth let's just say, is relatively easy to measure. So, how much money you're making an hour, in a year, a lot of people know their net worth overall and that's kind of easy to compare and see how that is versus your neighbor or your colleague -- whatever it might be.

We know those statistics about our physical health; we know how much we weigh; we know how much we eat on day-to-day basis (the number of calories), but we really don't have very good measures about how our careers are doing in a comprehensive way that we can track and follow. We don't have any measures in most cases of the health of our social relationships, of what we're giving to the community. And one of the things that we learned over the years in working with people and organizations on their strengths and engagements is that what gets measured, gets managed. So we know how to measure our BMI, and we manage towards it. We know how to measure our wealth, so we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels to increase our hourly earnings or whatever that might be. But that might lead us to take a little bit of focus off the time we spend with our families and what we're putting into our broader career pursuits and path.

R: And you think that, because some of these areas are so easy to measure, we shine a light on them and therefore give them more of our energy?

T: I think that's part of it. Certainly there are other things that contribute to focusing more energy and narrowing those areas, but it's interesting. One of the real surprising findings from our tracking, in the U.S. particularly, was when we asked people how much time they spent with friends or family members -- social time on any given day. Each additional hour of social time kind of doubles your chances of having more happy moments than pure stressful moments. Whether it's time spent socializing at work, talking to friends on the telephone, instant messaging, emailing, time at home with family. They get about five or six hours of social time a day; that was a lot more than any of us had ever expected. We stepped back and looked at it and, sure enough, every additional hour of social time could be just as important or more important than every additional hour of sleep. And you don't think about it in that respect.

Be sure to listen to the full Tom Rath interview at www.richerlife.com.

(Robert Pagliarini is a CBS MoneyWatch columnist and the author of "The Other 8 Hours: Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth & Purpose" and the national best-seller "The Six Day Financial Makeover." Visit www.YourOther8Hours.com.)